SWEET NOTHINGS

Navigating the candyverse, and memory, from Andes to Zero.

Perry and candy have a magnetic relationship, inexorably drawn to each other. She’s a ’90s kid with an insatiable taste for Twizzlers, Swedish Fish, Junior Mints, and just about any candy you care to name—hard, chewy, or melty. Perry organizes the book’s sections by different shades; she prefers the colors red and (chocolate) brown. If eating a Twizzler is a devotional, Rolos are abject surrender, an expression of community and unadulterated rapture. But which of the dozens is her favorite? Pleasure, she notes, is circumstantial, so a favorite depends on the mood and environment. Perry approaches candy like a field marshal shifting tactics: different avenues of attack for each quarry. She demonstrates that texture matters, sometime more than taste, as does technique. It’s not just the candy that elicits her fealty or disfavor; it’s the packaging, too. But the author unwraps much more than a lifetime’s fixation on candy. While Perry’s accounts of candy consumption are sensual, almost tactile, and indescribably delicious, each chapter is also a pathway to deep recollection of the past, not all of it sugarcoated. Especially touching are reminiscences of her mother, who died young. There is a vein of melancholy woven throughout, leavening the joys. Now and then she engages in rather ideological social commentary, yet she manages to choreograph “the ego and the id in a delicate dance.” Perry can tap into the communal candy memory with a fine comedic touch, calling forth many a Yes! moment. “Candy is about happiness in the moment—this exact moment, each subdivided microsecond of melt,” she writes, “each deliriously destructive chomp.”

With flair and a winning nostalgia, a certified sugar hound of the first order shares her obsessions.